Next week I’ll be travelling to New Orleans to participate in the big Joint Mathematics Meetings. The “Joint” refers to the fact that it is cosponsored by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America (no Life of Brian jokes please.)

As you can see, on Saturday the 6th I will be delivering a scintillating, edge-of-your-seat, rhetorical masterpiece of a talk entitled “Cheeger Constants of Certain Arithmetic Hyperbolic Three-Manifolds.” Yes, that’s what I spend my time on when I’m not doing this blog.

Alas, the preparations for the conference will occupy me for most of the next few days. That, coupled with actually going to the conference and then having to start classes again as soon as I return, will be eating up most of my time for the next two weeks or so. So, I will be on blog vacation for a little while.

So a heartfelt thanks to everyone who has stopped by, and to all of the commenters for providing so much food for thought. And a big thanks to the folks at Seed for inviting me to join their little party this year. It is an honor to be included with all the talented people listed on the Science Blogs main page.

My wife and I were at an international conference in New Orleans 18 years ago. It was the worst organized one of its kind we’d ever been to. We’d be waiting in the “green room” before leaving to make our presentations. Eventually, an “organizer” would tell us that it had been rescheduled to an hour earlier, and we’d never been told, and we’d missed it.

We gave up on the conference and spent the rest of the week as tourists, wining, dining, and listening to music. I hope that, despite the best efforts of the White House to destroy the city, it is again becoming a great venue for conferences.

We tell our son that he’d been to New Orleans, but didn’t get a good look, having been in utero at the time.

Jason, what’s truly funny is that just this morning I read an old “Shoe” comic strip in which the editor receives a notice that says: “The Marijuana Institute and the League of Horrid Punsters … are holding a joint press conference.”